On 3/8/2012 12:34 PM, Max Orhai wrote:
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
> - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally
benign
> and affordable.
>
That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and
environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of
ebooks.
Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm
conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much
time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind.
I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the
past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life
for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much
in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller
town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in
business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do
well in small batches. My point is just that print technology
(specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world
which is local, nontoxic, and "sustainable" (in the sense of only
needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I
find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in
time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and
disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or
less? It's horrifying.
I would guess, apart from macro-scale parts/materials reuse (from
electronics and similar), one could maybe:
grind them into dust and extract reusable materials via means of
mechanical separation (magnetism, density, ..., which could likely
separate out most bulk glass/plastic/metals/silicon/... which could then
be refined and reused);
maybe feed whatever is left over into a plasma arc, and maybe use either
magnetic fields or a centrifuge to separate various raw elements (dunno
if this could be made practical), or maybe dissolve it with strong acids
and use chemical means to extract elements (could also be expensive), or
lacking a better (cost effective) option, simply discard it.
the idea for a magnetic-field separation could be:
feed material through a plasma arc, which will basically convert it into
mostly free atoms;
a large magnetic coil accelerates the resultant plasma;
a secondary horizontal magnetic field is applied (similar to the one in
a CRT), causing elements to deflect based on relative charge (valence
electrons);
depending on speed and distance, there is likely to be a gravity based
separation as well (mostly for elements which have similar charge but
differ in atomic weight, such as silicon vs carbon, ...);
eventually, all of them ram into a wall (probably chilled), with a more
or less 2D distribution of the various elements (say, one spot on the
wall has a big glob of silicon, and another a big glob of gold, ...).
(apart from mass separation, one will get mixes of "similarly charged"
elements, such as globs of silicon carbide and titanium-zirconium and
similar)
an advantage of a plasma arc is that it will likely result in some
amount of carbon-monoxide and methane and similar as well, which can be
burned as fuel (providing electricity needed for the process). this
would be similar to a traditional gasifier.
but, it is possible that in the future, maybe some more advanced forms
of manufacturing may become more readily available at the small scale.
a particular example is that it is now at least conceivably possible
that lower-density lower-speed semiconductor electronics (such as
polymer semiconductors) could be made at much smaller scales and cheaper
than with traditional manufacturing (silicon wafers and optical
lithography), but at this point there is little economic incentive for
this (companies don't care, as they have big expensive fabs to make
chips, and individuals and communities don't care as they don't have
much reason to make their own electronics vs just buying those made by
said large semiconductor manufacturers).
similarly, few people have much reason to invest much time or money in
technologies which are likely to max out in the MHz range.
but, conceivably, one could make a CPU, and memory, essentially using
conductive and semiconductive inks and an old-style printing-plates
(possibly, say, on a celluloid substrate), if needed (making a CPU
probably itself sort of resembling a book...). also sort of imagining
some here the idle thought of movable-type logic gates and similar, ...
granted, such a scenario is very unlikely at present (it would likely
only occur due to a collapse of current manufacturing or distribution
architecture). any restoration of the ability to do large scale
manufacture is likely to result in a quick return to faster and more
powerful technologies (such as optical lithography).
apart from a loss of knowledge, it is unlikely society would return to
an entirely pre-industrial state, though many hybrid forms seem possible.
societal collapse and a loss of heavy industry need not necessarily mean
an end to either electronics or computers (or society either looking
like the mid 1800s, or for that matter, like the "Mad Max" movies...).
I can only conceive of paper books having a lower TCO than ebooks if
people usually spent all day reading the same book again and again for
several years.
Well, I had my own book collection in mind, which is well under 100
volumes, almost all mathematics, and I expect will last me for a few
more decades anyway. More ephemeral books I'm happy to get out of the
libraries, or 'rent' from the local used bookstores. Quality before
quantity is a major part of the POV I'm trying to get across. YMMV if
you prefer lots of cheap, fast-decaying information, which I am fully
aware is the trend these days.
many of my books tended to be assorted old computer-related books (with
some random math books and old text-books and similar in the mix).
a few things I had manually printed and bound, mostly for sake of being
able to reference things easier in this form than as PDF's.
-- Max
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
[email protected]
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
[email protected]
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
